Monday, September 24, 2012

How have you extended your classroom outside of the school day? Have you seen changes in student performance or success? Has your school or district made any changes to the length of the school day or year? What are your thoughts on the time and place edge? If you are interested, you can find many of the videos referred to in this chapter here.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

This chapter is full of amazing examples of technology being used to enhance teaching to lead to greater student success. We see examples of online learning, one-to-one classrooms, the use of audio recording, wikis and other web 2.0 tools, gaming, and assistive technologies, among other things. After reading this chapter, think about one or two ways that you have changed your methods of teaching to utilize technology or, if you have not made these changes yet, which of these ideas sounds like it would work the best with your teaching methods and your students. Share your ideas, successes, or struggles in this blog entry.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Last week we looked at our thinking about education. This week, Dr. Chen challenges us to rethink curriculum. In this chapter, Dr. Chen shares some incredibly inspiring stories about shifts in curriculum at schools in the United States and around the world. Some of the big ideas in this section are a move to project-based learning, offering more foreign language courses (specifically Asian languages), the addition of multimedia communication to the curriculum, the need to consider the emotional lives of our students, and a shift in assessment to more accurately assess what we want our students to learn. Have you considered any of these areas in creating/revising your curriculum? Have you or your school made any dramatic shifts and, if so, what have been the outcomes? What concerns do you have in "the curriculum edge"?

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Edge 1 is all about changing our way of thinking about education. In this chapter, Dr. Chen discusses ten areas of education where we need to move from either/or to both-and thinking. What are your thoughts about this idea and of these ten either/ors? Can you think of any other either/ors that need to change to both-ands? Share them and your thoughts on this idea.